By the time her will was shaken, by the time she might have broken and offered what they wanted in exchange for her freedom, she’d forgot who she’d been. She remembered that she had been someone else, but here, in this place, this dark, terrifying place, she was only Eve.
She was no one else, and there was nowhere else. So she shored up her will, she held fast to what she knew, and she fought to keep hold.
At first, she remembered, there had been other women. She’d been allowed sometimes from this small, shadowy cell, led by stern-looking women in severe grey dresses into a large room where other women like her gathered. She remembered being allowed out into the daylight sometimes, too. No longer. How long had it been since she’d seen more walls than these, or no walls at all? A lifetime, perhaps.
There’d been a fight, she remembered that. In the large room where the women were given bowls of stew and cups of water. Some women had pushed their bowls and cups away at once, and others had followed. Eve had followed, she remembered that. They’d sat with their hands in their laps, quietly, and refused to eat.
They’d sat quietly and refused before that, too. The hunger had been howling in Eve’s belly already. A hunger strike, it was. Because they were unjustly imprisoned.
She remembered that—what she was, why she was in this place. She fought for justice.
Had she? Why couldn’t she remember the fight? Had she fought only here?
She must have fought before. Why else would she be in this place?
On the last day she remembered being with other women, women like her, she’d fought. It was a vivid image in a mind filled with shadows and ghosts. One of the stern women had picked up the bowl of soup before her, grabbed her by the hair, and tried to force the bowl’s contents into her mouth. She’d remembered being forced to swallow what she didn’t want, and she’d fought back.
Fighting with her hands wasn’t a skill she had, but she’d acted from some kind of bestial instinct that lurked deep in her chest. She’d knocked the bowl away, splattering its watery contents across the splintery table, and spun from her chair. Hanks of her hair had pulled from her head, but she hadn’t cared. The bright sparks of superficial pain had cleared her mind and galvanised her. She’d clenched her fist and thrown it straight into the matron’s face.
She hadn’t expected the punch to hurt her hand so much, and in the moment of that shock, she’d been hit by a stick-wielding guard and knocked to the floor.
Others who’d been forced had fought as well. All around her, women fought, and the terrifying men in uniforms beat them with clubs and fists.
Two guards dragged her back to this bleak cell, and she hadn’t left it since.
She hadn’t eaten since, either. She remembered she shouldn’t eat, that keeping her mouth closed was the only fight left to her. It was important not to eat. How many days? Had it been weeks? Sometimes, the door opened, and two terrifying men came in, followed by a severe woman. A tray was left and her pot was emptied. She took the water and ignored the food, though for a while it had called to her, drawn her, tempted her. But then the smell began to turn her shriveled stomach, and the temptation waned.
A small man came in once or twice, a doctor, to listen to her heart and poke at her body. “You must eat, dear,” he always said, but she said nothing.
They’d punished her for not eating. They’d beaten her, they’d taken away her shapeless dress and her flimsy shoes. And her pillow, her blanket, her sheet, leaving her to shiver in a thin shift on a soiled mattress. But she remembered that to refuse food was to resist, and she carried on.
She was lonely, and cold, and starving. Weak. Her mind stayed far away from this cold, forlorn place. She sat on the flat mattress and tried to hold on to who she was.
Eve. But not Eve. Someone else. But no one else.
The door opened with a sharp, metallic screech. As the guards pushed into the cell she stood, fighting off woozy weakness that made the room reel and sway, and pressed her back to the wall. Satisfied that she had done what she was supposed to do, they stood scowling at each side of the door, their sticks in their hands.
The grey-gowned matron came in with a new tray. She saw that the earlier tray sat where it had been left, untouched, as usual. In the past, she’d simply nodded to one of the guards pick up the old tray. They rarely spoke to Eve, and she never spoke to them. Silence was comfortable. Safe. Known.
This time, the matron sighed and stepped out of the room. She came back without the new tray, picked up the old tray, and took that away as well. When she returned to the room, she walked right up to Eve, close enough that their noses nearly touched, and said, “I’ll not be wasting food on you no more. There’s folks on the streets go beggin’ for scraps while you foolish lot turn your noses up at good, hot food. But if you think you’ll starve yourself to death on my watch and have that to hang on my neck, you’re sorely mistaken.”
She swept out again, and the guards followed her.
Eve collapsed onto her bunk and let her mind drift into its shadows. The matron’s threats meant nothing in the shadows.
The next time the door screeched open, the guards grabbed her before she could get up and stand where she was supposed to stand when they came in. Clutched in their beefy, bruising hands, she fought, thoughtlessly, knowing only that to grab her like that meant danger and harm coming. She twisted and yanked and pulled. She shrieked and howled and lunged, trying to reach their arms with the only weapon she had—her teeth. When she caught hold, she bit down as hard as she could, and the man connected to that arm shouted.
The matron slapped her, hard, and jerked a sack over her head, and she fought harder then, as hard as she could, but to no avail. When they tried to make her walk from the cell, she let her knees sag, and they dragged her instead. She was barefoot, dressed only in a yellowed shift. The rough stones of the floor tore at the tops of her feet, she felt her skin scrape and open and bleed, but she wouldn’t walk where they wanted her to go.
All she remembered was resistance, and she held to that with all that was left of her.
They dragged her into another room, another cell, she thought. The guards threw her into something hard and unyielding, like a chair. She tried to rise at once, but they were much bigger and stronger than she. Someone pushed her hard onto the seat and dropped a hefty thigh across her lap, and the guards bound her to the chair, closing leather straps across her wrists, her ankles, her waist.
Then the sack was pulled from her head, and she saw that she was indeed in a cell, one just like her own, but empty except for the chair she was shackled into. Two terrifying guards and four stern matrons gathered before her, their mouths set in identical dead slashes. The guards stepped back, and then the small doctor came in. Yet another matron followed him, pushing a cart filled with tools and devices she couldn’t comprehend.
A matron shook out a white sheet and laid it over her, tucking it around her shoulders. Two others held her head, forcing it back so all she could see was the ceiling and their horrifying, empty faces.
Terror colder than ice or stone solidified the blood in her veins. She knew what they meant to do. She clamped her teeth together and closed all the muscles of her throat. Another matron rose up in her vision and grabbed her chin. The doctor was there, too, looming above her eyes. He held a metal thing, like a horse bit, but not.
She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t, or they’d win. Through her clamped teeth, her locked throat, she grunted. Against the leather bonds and human hands, she struggled. But she was small and weak, and they were big and strong. The metal pushed hard on her lips, cutting them, bruising. The hand clamped brutally on her chin drew down, demanding, forcing her jaw to open. They pinched her nose closed.
She fought with all she was, but she was not enough.
When she had to breathe, the metal pushed into her mouth, and they tied it around her head, fixing it in place so that her mouth was wedged wide open. Trapped and helpless, she watched as a long, thick rubber tube was held over her head. The doctor fed the tube into her mouth.
Of its own volition, her body fought that invasion. She choked and retched and squirmed in her restraints, but it continued down her throat, beyond her throat. She felt it in her chest, and still it went down. She felt it reach her stomach, that desiccated organ she’d abandoned, and then it stopped.
But the worst was yet to come. They cut off the tubing at her mouth and attached a funnel to it. One of the matrons poured something into the funnel.
She felt it move through the tube, through her body, and fill her stomach, cold and slimy and vile. They poured and poured, and her stomach filled to bursting with the ooze. When they were done, they pulled the tube out of her—swiftly, brusquely, and it was like it had grown claws inside her. They removed the thing holding her mouth open, and she screamed—and then retched so hard she thought her stomach was leaping up her throat.
Two matrons slammed her mouth closed and held it that way, forcing her to keep what roared back up, forcing her to swallow down the burning vomit, and then again, when her stomach rejected it a second time. And a third time. Her eyes and nose streamed, and she could scarcely breathe, but they, who’d been so determined to get her mouth open, now held it closed until she and her stomach could fight no more.
They swiped at her face with the corner of the sheet. Finally, they unbound her from the horrible chair, and they dragged her back to her cell and left her on her bare mattress, sobbing and shaking.
She didn’t have to endure this. She was someone who could be saved. She was important. Had been important. Hadn’t she?
No. She was only this. Alone.
The horror of the feeding nearly undid her, and when they did it again, and she understood they would always do it, that might well have undone her if she’d had any escape. Instead, she sent her mind away and dug in with her body.
The fifth time they came for her, she was strong enough to fight. When she still refused to eat from her tray, she knew what would happen, and she prepared. The door opened, and she leapt from her bed, holding the tray in both hands, and bashed it into the face of the first guard. She heard the crunch of bones breaking, she felt it, and when she pulled her arms back, she saw that she’d flattened his nose into a wet, red, flower. She bashed him again in the same place before he could sort himself out, and when the other guard tried to grab her, she swung around and bashed him, too, catching him across the ear with the side of the tray. He shouted and grabbed his ear. It was the matrons, the women, who brought her down and beat her.
She curled on the floor, covered her head, and closed her eyes as their fists and feet rained down on her. When they’d beaten the fight out of her, the guards picked her up and threw her on the bed, and they all left.
While she lay curled on the bed and aching, the doctor came in. Two matrons came with him. But they didn’t drag her up. Instead, the doctor opened his bag. He pulled a case from it and opened that. She watched as he lifted a hypodermic syringe from the case and filled it from a vial.
“What is that?” she tried to ask, but it had been so long since she’d spoken words, and her mouth and throat had been so abused, no sound came out, and her mouth barely shaped the words.
He took her arm and pushed the needle in.
In seconds, her body went to meet her mind in the faraway place.
When she woke, she couldn’t move.
She was somewhere else, somewhere different. The sounds and smells were wrong. And she wasn’t cold. And she couldn’t move.
Trying again, she understood that she could move, her body was capable of it, but she’d been wrapped up in some kind of heavy sheet or something, trapping her hands so that they crossed her chest, as if she were embracing herself.
She rolled to her back, and struggled then to sit up.
It was a cell she was in, still a prison, but this was different. The place she’d been was dark and grey and damp. This place was bright—electric lights in the ceiling—and white. White floor, white walls, white bed. She was wrapped in a white thing, and over her legs was a different kind of shift, also white.
The white door opened with a metallic screech she recognised, and a man in a white coat came into the room. He closed the door and dragged a low white stool from the corner of the room. Sitting beside the bed, he smiled at her. “Good afternoon, Eve. I’m Dr. Brown. How are you feeling?”
Her head ached, and her body. Her throat, and her stomach. It hurt to breathe. Her mouth was swollen and sore. She didn’t know where she was, or who this doctor was, or why she was bound up like she was. All the questions jammed themselves up at the back of her raging throat, and no words came out.
When it became clear that she wouldn’t answer his question, he asked another. “Do you know where you are?”
She shook her head.
“This is Bethlehem Royal Hospital, Eve. You are quite ill, a danger to yourself and others, but we’re going to try to make you better here, if we can. If you’ll help us, and yourself.”
Bedlam. She was in Bedlam.
The prison had committed her to an asylum for the insane.
She raised her head and tried to scream, but no sound would come.
After the first night, she was moved from the cell and put in a bed in a ward with other women. Terrifying guards in white unwound her from the jacket, and she tried to remember to fight, but her arms were numb and refused her commands. They put her docile body in the bed and bound her wrists and ankles to it.
Around her, women moaned and chattered and shrieked.
They were all restrained in their beds, freed only to eat, and for ‘treatment.’ Some were allowed up for recreation, in the garden or elsewhere, but that was a privilege to be earned, and she hadn’t yet earned it. She wouldn’t earn it. But there were windows, high and barred, but windows, and sometimes streaks of sunlight.
All she remembered was resistance. There was something to fight for, and it was important. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t, simply accept the things they did to her. She would fight.
Was she insane? Perhaps. Her mind slipped and slid, just out of reach, and she knew there were things, nearly everything, memories and truths about herself, that she couldn’t grasp. But a voice inside her whispered. It told her that what she couldn’t reach was being kept safe, away from those who would take it from her. They wanted her to be insane. They could dismiss her if she was insane. But she wasn’t, and someday they would know it.
All she had to do was fight.
So she didn’t eat. She didn’t speak. When they loosened her bonds, she lashed out at them. When they forced the tube down her throat, she made it difficult, even when she hurt more in her struggle.
When they wound her up in that accursed canvas straitjacket and locked her in a dark room, she let the shadows around her merge with the shadows inside her, and she endured. When they cut her hair away, letting the long tresses fall over her, she took the humiliation without a flinch. When they submerged her in icy water, her body bound up helplessly, she screamed at the racking shock and pain. She forced the sound over the ruins of her throat and mouth, but she listened to that whispering voice that assured her that what they did was done to her, not for her.
She wasn’t insane; they were cruel.
When the doctor sat with her and tried to talk to her, his voice high and soft, as if she were a child, she stared and thought about what it was he wanted of her. Her compliance. Her submission. Her words—no, not her words. His words, from her mouth. Her voice. He wanted her voice.
She gave him nothing, and each time, he went away and sent the guards in for her.
All she had was what was left of her. She held on to what she needed of herself and let her mind stay away, far away.
One day, while her stomach still churned and her mouth still bled from a feeding, the white-coated guards came in, pushing a gurney, and unbound her from the ward bed. They forced her arms into the hated straitjacket and bound her up again. As she fought and kicked and grunted, they muscled her onto the gurney and strapped her down. They gagged her and pulled a sack over her head, black and blinding. They’d never done that before.
In blackness, she rode through the corridors, a longer journey than she expected. The gurney pushed through double doors—she could tell by the sound—and then she was in a vast, echoing place. And not alone. The rustle of bodies and murmur of voices surrounded her and resounded softly around her. She lifted her head, and could see a ring of light through the dark fabric. Bright light, overhead. The sun? No, not the sun. There was no warmth in this light. This room was cold and harsh. Electric light.
Shoving away the need to scamper into her inner darkness and leave this place as much as she could, instead she stretched out for her mind and dragged it back. She needed her wits about her for this. Something bad was coming, something wicked and dangerous. Where was she? What was happening?
Hands unfastened the straps across her chest, belly, and legs, and she fought as soon as she could. Her throat was too raw from the recent feeding to scream, but she tried anyway, and a strange, inhuman sound left her chest and pushed around the gag. Then she felt the prick of a needle at her neck, and her fight spilled out the hole it made.
“As you can see,” Dr. Brown said to the other people in the room. “This patient is quite far gone. She came to us from Holloway, arrested for destruction of government property and other violent acts. She continued violent during her incarceration, until she had a severe dissociative event and beat two guards badly, at which point she was committed to our care.”
A rumble of talk rolled through the room. There were many people, many men here. The pinprick hadn’t sent her away, but her senses, those she had left, wobbled. The sounds waved around her, and the gurney seemed to rock like a ship on the ocean.
She’d never been on the ocean, had she? No. She’d wanted to—she’d hoped to sail far, far away.
In dragging her mind back to help her, she’d brought memories, too. Incomplete and wrapped in floss, but closer than they’d been for longer than she knew.
She was lifted from the gurney and laid on another. It didn’t occur to her to try to fight until they were strapping her down again. She was still in the straitjacket, still in the hood, still gagged, now drugged, but they strapped her to this new thing.
“I’ve given her a small dose of sedative, to calm her. In the dose I’ve administered, it won’t have an adverse effect on her response to the treatment. It will make her pliable but retain her sensory responses. You’ll notice that she is quite frail. She has refused nourishment for some weeks now and is only sustained through therapeutic feeding. She is also suffering from psychotic muteness and hasn’t spoken since her admission here. Her hysteria is reaching a crisis stage.”
“She’s a suffragette, doctor?” A man in his audience called.
“Yes, I suppose she is.”
Was she? Yes! That was the fight! She was a suffragette! The thought gave her a shock of pride.
“Are you not worried about the political or social implications of her commitment?”
“As I understand it, she has no people. No father, no husband. She provides us with an opportunity to study the psychosis that makes these women behave in such extreme ways. The resistance to improvement is profound. Already in this case we’ve tried hydrotherapy, isolation, even talk therapy, with only degradation of her condition.”
She did have people. A father. A brother. An aunt. Not a husband—but she’d been in love. She’d loved. The whispering voice began frantically sweeping away the fog and dust and cobwebs in her mind. She’d loved. She still loved. He might have been a husband, had she been allowed to choose him. William. His name was William. And she wasn’t Eve.
She whimpered against the gag. Who was she?
The doctor lifted her leg, raising it high. He set it in a sling of some sort, and then lifted her other leg into another sling. He bound them in place.
She was bare under her gown, and now her legs were raised and spread. Cool air touched her in her most private place, and she knew that all the men in this room were looking there.
“I’ll leave the hood on to protect her modesty.”
A man cleared his throat and asked, “Doctor, may I ask—there have been studies suggesting that pelvic manipulation isn’t an effective treatment for hysteria. In fact, a study was published very recently questioning the validity of the diagnosis itself.”
“I’ve read these studies. The latter one you refer to—written by an American female physician, as I recall.”
“Yes, sir. Dr. Adelaide Linville, I believe.”
“Dr. Linville has made quite a hubbub in the medical journals of late. Her sister, as I understand it, is a militant for women’s votes in America. I would argue that Dr. Linville’s obvious bias renders her argument contestable, at least. Moreover, she is not a psychiatrist. Hysteria is a condition first identified by the Greeks. Thousands of years of medical practice and observation confirm the merit of its diagnosis. And with thirty years of my own experience, I can tell you in perfect certainty that hysteria is a real mental illness, with serious consequences, and that pelvic manipulation is a widely effective treatment. Now, if there are no other questions …”
No one spoke. She’d focused hard on all the words being said, but her mind floated on a cloud and wanted only to play in the memories she’d brought back. Her horse, Middy—riding him wildly through fields. Playing in the woods, digging in the dirt. Fancy dresses and boring balls. Sitting with her father by the fire, reading.
William. William. William. She loved him. Who was he? Dark-haired and bearded. Handsome. Kind.
“It’s important to make sure the area is well oiled. Sometimes the process takes quite a while, up to half an hour or more, and abrasions can occur without proper lubrication. The new devices of the past few years shorten the treatment dramatically but increase the need for lubrication.”
She felt an oily hand push inside her, and she jerked back, but her body barely moved. She could feel him, but not move herself. What had he given her?
“Hush, dear. This won’t hurt.”
He pulled his finger out of her and rubbed around the area, over a blasting node of sensation. Her clitoris. She knew about the clitoris.
“It’s called the clitoris.”
“Well, it’s wonderful.”
“Yes, it is.”
She remembered that moment, and its happiness.
William—William had taught her about it. William, her love. Who’d loved her, made love to her, shown her. William. William Frazier.
“I love you, Nora. Would you be my wife?”
And she was Nora. Nora Tate. Who had a family, and love, and a life waiting for her.
Then why was she here? Why was she alone?
A loud, frightening buzz filled the echoing space. “This model provides both internal and external stimulation of the appropriate areas,” Dr. Brown spoke over the noise. “Her hymen is already broken, so there’s no concern on that point. It’s important to monitor the temperature of the device. After ten minutes or so, it becomes too hot to use comfortably, for the doctor or the patient. Pay close attention. You’ll know the session is successful, and completed, when you see the paroxysms.”
He pushed the buzzing thing on her, and she—Nora—tried to contract her body against it, to resist this violation as she resisted the rubber tube. But he pushed, and her body couldn’t obey. It let the thing pass into her. She understood what this was, a corruption of what she’d had with William, and a forceful intrusion into her most private self. A rape.
Bound and drugged, her mouth gagged and her head hooded, she could do nothing but lie there while it happened to her.
And to weep when her body responded. To weep for the restored memory of such feelings brought forth by loving hands, and for the perversion of them now.
To weep because she was alone. She’d had everything, and now all she had was her fight.
She couldn’t resist, but she would not submit.